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Random stuff I'm making and thinking

security

Most of our embedded devices use eMMC, but security into eMMC (as far as I know) has not been extensively studied or taken account of in threat models. In the small sample of devices I’ve looked at, the ability to send raw commands to the eMMC only requires kernel access. If you look at the Android platform, kernel hacks are not uncommon and remote kernel hacks are also not a rarity. There are certain commands that a hacker can send which can permanently disable (brick) a device. Continue reading →

It’s been about a year since I revealed the first userland Vita exploit and I still occasionally get messages asking “what happened” (not much) or “when can I play my downloaded games” (hopefully never) or “I want homebrew” (me too). While I don’t have anything new exploitwise (same problems as before: no open SDK, lack of interest in the development community, lack of time on my part), I do want to take the time and go over why it’s taking so long. Continue reading →

I was bored one weekend and decided to jailbreak the new Kindle firmware. It was time consuming to find bugs, but not difficult. Unlike the iPhone, the Kindle doesn’t really have security. They have a verified FS and signed updates and that’s it, but I will still call my jailbreak an “exploit” just to piss you off. Previous Kindle 3 jailbreaks worked (AFAIK, I haven’t really looked into it) by tricking the Kindle into running a custom script by redirecting a signed script using a syslink. This worked because the updater scans only “files” that do not end with “.sig” (signature files to validate the file). They fixed this now by scanning all non-directorys that do no end with “.sig”. This is the first bug I’ve exploited. Part one is getting the files into the update, which I did by conventionally renaming them to “.sig” even though they’re not signature files. Part two is harder, getting the unsigned script to run. Continue reading →